Act IV, scene xvi–Act V, scene i

Important Quotations Explained

Summary

Proculeius arrives at the queen’s monument and asks Cleopatra’s terms
for giving herself up to Caesar. Cleopatra remembers that Antony
told her to trust Proculeius and tells the Roman she hopes the emperor
will allow her son to rule Egypt. Proculeius assures her that Caesar
will be generous and says that Caesar will soon repay her supplication
with kindness. Meanwhile, his soldiers, having slipped into the
monument, move to seize Cleopatra. The queen draws a dagger, hoping
to kill herself before being taken captive, but Proculeius disarms
her. He orders the soldiers to guard the queen until Caesar arrives,
and Cleopatra cries that she will never allow herself to be carried
through Rome as a trophy of the empire’s triumph.

Dolabella arrives and takes over for Proculeius. The
queen converses with him, discussing her dreams (in which she sees
a heroic vision of Antony), and then persuades Dolabella to admit
that Caesar plans to display her as a prisoner of war. Caesar arrives
and promises to spare Cleopatra’s children and treat her well if
she does not kill herself. She gives him a scroll that hands over
all her treasure to him—or so she says. When Cleopatra asks her
treasurer, Seleucus, to confirm that she has given Caesar everything,
Seleucus contradicts her. Cleopatra rails against the treachery
of her servant, but Caesar comforts her. He assures her that he
does not desire her wealth, since he is far greater than a mere
merchant. When Caesar leaves, Cleopatra admits to her maids that
she doubts his intentions, remarking to her companions that he is
charming her with words, and Iras and Charmian encourage her to
follow her plan toward death. Confirming Cleopatra’s doubts, Dolabella
admits that Caesar means to convey the queen to Rome and encourages
the queen to respond to this news as she sees fit.

Rather than succumb to the infamy of being a spectacle
for the entertainment of filthy Roman crowds, Cleopatra resolves
to kill herself. She would rather die than see herself imitated
by a boy actor, who would portray her as a common whore. She orders
Charmian and Iras to dress her in her most queenly robes. When they
have done so, she admits into her presence a clown, who brings her
a basket of figs that contains asps—poisonous snakes.

Dressed in her finest royal garments, Cleopatra kisses
her maids goodbye. Iras falls dead, and Cleopatra takes a snake
from the basket and presses it to her breast. She applies another
asp to her arm, and dies. As the guards rush in to discover the
dead queen, Charmian presses the snake to herself and joins her
mistress in death. Dolabella enters, followed by Caesar. They realize
the manner of the suicide, and Caesar orders Cleopatra to be buried
next to Antony in a public funeral.

Analysis

If the Roman Empire represents reason and order, then
it is possible to view Antony’s suicide as a result of his Western
sensibilities, which prevent him from understanding himself as anything
other than a typical Roman hero. Cleopatra’s death follows her lover’s, and
though her suicide might, as she hopes, bring about her reunion with
Antony, her reasons for killing herself are decidedly non-Western.
In the play’s simplified, romanticized conception of East and West,
Cleopatra’s application of the deadly snakes is a product of her
Eastern sensibilities. Whereas Antony’s Roman mind cannot conceive
of Antony as a vanquished general or jilted lover, Cleopatra will
not allow her multifaceted identity to be stripped to one of its
simplest, basest components. Throughout the course of the play, her
character has been as shifting as the clouds that Antony describes
in Act IV, scene xv. Her love and her grief are, at turns, convincing
and suspiciously theatrical. She gives her heart to Antony and then,
with no warning, her political allegiance to his enemy. She treats
her servants with surpassing kindness and then, moments later, beats
them ruthlessly. Cleopatra is decidedly inconstant; yet, she is
never anything less than herself: passionate, grand, and over the
top. Thus, she refuses to allow the Romans to reduce her to their understanding
of her, to parade her through their filthy streets as some prepubescent
boy mimics her greatness: “I’ th’ posture of a whore” (V.ii.217).
By killing herself, Cleopatra remains Cleopatra.

Of the many performances Cleopatra stages throughout the
play, her triumph over the Romans in Act V, scene ii is, without
doubt, her greatest. Here, her complex character seems to have secret
longings and undisclosed motivations. For instance, she seems resigned
to joining Antony in death at the end of Act IV, scene xvi, concurring with
him that suicide and resolve are their only friends. We may wonder,
then, why Cleopatra bothers convincing Dolabella to reveal Caesar’s
desire to turn her into the empire’s trophy. Caesar’s intentions
wouldn’t matter to someone as committed to dying as Cleopatra says
she is. Similarly, her motivations for trying to preserve her possessions
from Caesar are unclear. Perhaps she entertains a hope of starting
a new life in spite of Antony’s death. If so, she may only be pretending
to court death until Dolabella’s admission of Caesar’s plans makes
her death a necessity.

These doubts and questions testify to the complexity
and the contradictions inherent in the queen’s character. There
are depths to Cleopatra that we glimpse but to which we never gain
total access. She is beyond neat categories and tidy synopses.
Indeed, as she prepares to make her final exit, she dons a role
that, like her previous incarnations of hussy, enchantress, queen,
and shrew, reflects only one aspect of her character. Ironically,
she now strikes a pose as wife and nursing mother. As she applies
the poison snakes to her skin, Cleopatra fulfills her desire to
effect the quickest death in proper Roman fashion. In her quest
to win a kind of Roman nobility worthy of Antony, she brags of becoming
as constant as marble, her self no longer ruled by “the fleeting
moon” (V.ii.236). But to understand Cleopatra
in her final moments as a mere domestic, as an uncompromised lover
and dutiful wife, is to reduce her to a single aspect of her character.
She may claim to be as solid as marble, but before dying she reminds
the audience (and herself) that she is made of something much less
constant than stone: “I am fire and air; my other elements / I give
to baser life” (V.ii.280–281).